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New Territories

Rent concessions and travel subsidies are two ways of encouraging people to move to less popular areas in the New Territories that will in turn ease a long wait for public rental flats, a leading housing adviser has suggested.

The government should revive land exchange entitlements to speed up its plan for large-scale rural redevelopment in the New Territories, according to Walter Kwok Ping-sheung, the former chairman of Sun Hung Kai Properties.

A new twist could be thrown into the controversy over male-line inheritance rights in the New Territories by the court ruling allowing a transsexual to marry. This is just one area likely to be affected by the new definition of "woman" to cover male-to- female transsexuals, legal experts said yesterday.

Almost 70 per cent of new homes available for sale in the first half of the year are located in the New Territories, and since the government has signalled a move to increase land supply, developers will speed the launch of new projects to raise cash for land replenishment.

The 728-flat project being developed by Hong Kong Ferry (Holdings) is on the corner of Mak Sik Road and Sha Tau Kok Road, Fanling, next to the 15-year-old Belair Monte, which has been developed by a consortium of 11 developers.

Like most residents of the New Territories, I welcome the government's initiative to set up a new department to investigate what has become known in the media as unauthorised structures. New Territories residents know this to be a euphemism for "essential home improvements".

A New Year trip to the northeast New Territories and a chat with an indigenous villager had me seeing a side of a story I'd not considered. Ah Fat has a nice spread; he's got 2,100 square feet of standalone living space for his five-member family, vegetable and flower gardens, peace and tranquility all around and the rolling hills of Sheung Shui for scenery.

The government should pay serious attention to your editorial ("Housing needs wiser land use", January 10), which advanced useful, innovative ideas towards solving Hong Kong's problem of a shortage of land for housing development. As you correctly pointed out, the problem is the government's failure to make proper use of our vast land resources in the New Territories.

Only half of the New Territories village houses believed to have illegal structures have been reported to the Buildings Department, despite a scheme offering leniency to people who declare less-dangerous structures that ended on Monday.

Hong Kong should build more mosques and community centres for its growing Muslim population, an Islamic organisation said yesterday.

Khan Muhammad Malik, chairman of the Federation of Muslim Association in Hong Kong, noted that while the Islamic population had grown five-fold in the past five decades the number of mosques in the city had remained the same.